LEGO Sets For Sale/Trade

EDIT: ALL SETS LISTED BELOW HAVE NOW AVAILABLE sold ON BRICKLINK: http://www.bricklink.com/store.asp?p=316danny

I have a few sets I've bought recently that I'm looking to sell. I'm primarily looking to sell these locally, either to NCLUG members or to parents in NC who can pick these up at an NCLUG event (the plane in particular is more of a kid's set than a set I can use). We're hoping to have a meeting sometime in the next two weeks in the Raleigh area, and there will be a show at Wake Tech on June 20th and 21st.

There are three sets, listed below with links to info on them. I'm asking for half price on all three, and to be honest that's roughly what I paid on the two smaller sets, which are both still sealed in the box, never opened. The 7893 Passenger Plane has been previously opened, but the original owner never finished assembling it and all the parts are there (along with the box and instructions). The bag for part 3 of the model is still sealed. I went ahead and assembled part 1 and part 2 to verify that all the parts were there. Those parts are now partially assembled and in the box with the instructions. I did not apply any of the stickers, however, two of the stickers had previously been removed from the sticker sheet and placed properly on the steps leading up to the plane. The rest of the stickers are still on the sticker sheet.

Here's what I'd like for each of the sets:
$20 for 7893 Passenger Plane (lightly used condition, see above)
$5 for 7654 Droids Battle Pack (MINT condition)
$4 for 4750 Draco's Encounter with Buckbeak (MINT condition) claimed

I'm also open to trading these for other sets or parts - I'm always looking for basic bricks, useful special parts, and parts in special colors (light/dark greys, light/dark bleys, dark blue/red/orange/green, light blue/yellow/green, tan, orange...)

Although I am willing to ship these if someone really wants them and is willing to pay the shipping costs (this would likely involve buying special shipping boxes), I would really prefer to sell these locally instead.

Cafe-Corner-Styled WIP models

I wanted to share a sneak peak of some stuff I'll have ready for DGXPO. Most of this stuff is loosely Café Corner style. My 9V Thomas the Tank Engine got in there too (building him means I have now officially done everything that was on my to-do list when I was 6!)

The pictures are worth a few thousand words, and have some great techniques that I expect everyone will copy before I actually get around to using them in "real" models. Yes - all of the second floor details in this photo really are made of LEGO^® parts - the one glass pane on the first floor is the only non-LEGO part there.

Keebler Elf refurbishing (Shoes)

Several years back (between 2000 and 2002 I think) my mom bought this ridiculous promotional sculpture at the Londonderry, NH Goodwill store. We've found many exciting collectibles there dirt cheap (Chilly the polar bear FTW!) but when she brought the elf back, I had no idea what to do with it. We've been storing him in a ridiculous half-glued unable-to-stand state for years, but with DGXPO coming up, I saw an opportunity to finish the guy off. It also helps that the Belaire Toy/Brick/whatever-they-call-themselves-this-week Museum out in Ohio got their hands on a new-in-the-box copy of this promotional sculpture. Of course, the original has brown shoes, but hey, pre-2003 brown bricks are hard to come by! I was able to use MLCAD to create an exact copy of the shoes from the original sculpture by working off of photos of the model at the Belaire Museum. I took screenshots of the MLCAD version so that I could build the shoes quickly without needing to install all the CAD software on another computer.

Of course, some less-noteworthy parts were added too - mine has partially new hands, partially new legs, and a nose job. The nose is no longer an exact match for this one, but I had to cover up a huge scratch with something that looked passable.

Both the finished product and the screenshots are in the Brickshelf gallery: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=319898

I ought to clean this post up and put more links in sooner or later, but it's anyone's guess if/when I'll get to that.

Cake

I posted a few photos of the Cake I built for LEGOPalooza. It was the 50th anniversary of the patented design of the LEGO brick, so naturally a birthday cake was needed. I'm aware, by the way, that I was immediately bested by artist Sean Kenney. The main reason to rush this one was to take it apart and put the parts away. I'm not posting any building instructions because the interior construction is I-would-bring-shame-upon-my-family bad. If you do try to build a similar cake to this one, try doing it as a layer cake instead - several people told me that that would be more effective in making it recognizable.

Of course, the real fun was having actually found enough 2x2 round bricks in a Belville set the previous weekend - I had some nice candles there!

WIP Metro Station Mod

OK, so in a rare move, this has to do with a set that many people I've known for years are familiar with: the 4554 Metro Station. Aunt Debbie (hey - did I ever give her the address for this blog?) gave me this set when I graduated Kindergarten. My friend Steven (who I know is reading this) did a mod of this set with me when he was over some years back. I don't have any photos of that version, but it was built on a grey 15" square baseplate, had yellow walls all the way around and red walls inside - it changed the set from a simple station to a Train line headquarters, with several offices for various train officials. There wasn't a proper roof for that mod, but it worked well for a little while. I don't recall when I took that apart (probably during one of the moves), but I never did reattach the station to the base it originally came with.

I've previously mentioned here and elsewhere that I got my hands on some nice little bits of glass that I thought would make good windows for gigantic minifig-scale models - such as a shopping mall or European train station. I forget where I read it, but I seem to recall some more dedicated train fan explaining that the official set has that sort of European look already, so it wasn't hard to decide that that would be a fun project. Of course, if it were truly built similar to the Brussels station I was thinking of, there would be two trains that would have their lines end in the station - and for a display that won't be pre-programmed or micromanaged, it's better to set it up so that the train can go all the way through instead.

I hope to eventually come up with a solution that will be modular in Cafe-Corner fashion (and thus be easy to adjust to a few different shapes), but for now, it's going to just be this long, rough, open-to-the-rear shape. I hope to give it a real roof soon too.

Brickshelf link: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=319892

Hmm - looks like some other WIP stuff got in in the background.

Off-Topic: IRC.peeron.com used for XKCD?

EDIT 1/1/2009: The subdomain points to an unrelated server. A bit more explanation is provided in the comments to this post.

I'm guessing that this isn't what it looks like, but it looks like the popular LEGO set inventory website Peeron.com might be hosting an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and a geohashing script based on a webcomic. I feel kind of silly about being guilted into visiting the LEGO shop online through their links now that it looks like they're giving away bandwidth for something like that. Of course, now there's this magic link:

BrickLink Store Name?

I thought I'd get the grunt work out of the way today so that I could work on listing a few LEGO things for sale during the week. I'm not sure, though, what I want to name my store. I'm open to any suggestions - the only rule is that we're not allowed to have "LEGO" in a store's name.

Exciting Times

So I've been having a good share of excitement in the few days since my schedule started to open up again. Haven't done too much that people would notice on the computer - most of the online work I've done has been related to getting set up to sell things on various sites (I'm a new LinkShare affilliate now and by the end of the week I hope to be MetaExchange seller and BrickLink seller). The LinkShare thing will start appearing on my blogs in the near future.

Speaking of which, I might try to pick up music blogging again. One of the best parts of living in North Carolina this past week was a pair of free Arcade Fire shows. Arcade Fire has been one of the hottest bands around for the last couple years, and last year around this time I seriously considered paying $90 plus gas for a 12 hour round trip to see them. Now that NC matters for a primary, and both me and the band are Barack Obama supporters, they decided to throw a free concert at an Obama rally for all of us who are early voters (the official primary was yesterday, but I voted the previous Tuesday). Arcade Fire played a full set, covering half of Funeral and most of the highlights from Neon Bible, and they also did a cover of David Bowie's "Heroes". I'll go into more details if/when I get Unfound Bloom back in shape, but that project probably isn't going to improve much in the near future.

After that awesome show in Carrboro on Friday, I stopped by Durham to visit Sandy and trade some LEGO^® parts. His WIP buildings are all excellent, but that's to be expected at this point. I got the Destroyer Droids parts I wanted (along with the book and box to complete the set, and some nice extra parts), and I gave him some Ninja minifigs, parts from larger UFO sets (I've somehow managed to buy the entire UFO line used once over without ever getting enough parts to complete one of the better sets), Harry Potter books, a HTF Bionicle part and some tan cylinder portions.

Saturday turned out well, too. I bought the perfect piece of electronics for a larger project I'm working on (I'm keeping the project secret for now). I got it free at a church sale, but it works and I've already successfully gotten some basic stuff working with it. I also grabbed a nice new shelf - it was apparently a child-size shoe rack originally, but it's the right size for small storage bins and for smaller models and sets. I'm primarily putting long-term storage in the back and small models in the front - this is trickling down throughout the room, with larger shelfs now not having anything small on them, and lots of little things clearing up other storage areas. The only downside is that the perfect spot for the new shelf is where I had been storing stock to sell on the MetaExchange. So now I have to really hurry up and get some stuff sold.

I've been doing quite a bit of building and cleaning lately. My LEGO area is unrecognizable right now. The Cafe Corner and the Destroyer Droid are both finished. The 2xX storage unit that I put together 5 years ago (man - I hadn't realized it's been so long. I think it's been another 3 years since it's been accessible) went back up on the wall this morning. Lots of storage and display space is being juggled around.

OK, a few days have passed since I started writing this so I'll just put it up as-is for now. With any luck I'll get around to posting some other stuff soon too.